NICE ONE, CENTURION

“I truly believe that the wicket played a big role in the success that he had. He was able to extract every bit of life and uncertainty out of that wicket which, in turn, put us under an immense amount of pressure.”

It's a bit cheeky the way quotes are distilled. Nevertheless, Smurf is an oaf for complaining about the pitch after winning the toss and inviting Australia to bat; even though Clarke agreed. I wonder if Smurf's decision will haunt him like Ponting's blunder at Edgbaston.

It's all an aspect of the mental disintegration that the Varks are experiencing. Smurf is only held together by blue food colouring at this point. He got out flinching in the first dig, and got sucked in by an intelligent field placement in the second dig that was obviously planned through charting his scoring strokes. He failed on bottle and then on smarts. No wonder he's trying to look for an escape clause.

The poem was based on newspaper reports of "all is quiet tonight" based on official telegrams sent to the Secretary of War by Major-General George B. McClellan following the First Battle of Bull Run. Beers noticed that the report was followed by a small item telling of a picket being killed. She wrote the poem that same morning she read it in September, 1861

In 1863 the poem was set to music by John Hill Hewitt, himself a poet, newspaperman, and musician, who was serving in the Confederate army.

If Smurf was paying any sort of attention he'd appreciate that Good Mitch is just as capable of taking wickets on good batting tracks as well - witness the 'Gabba and particularly Adelaide, where he really had no business in taking seven wickets in what felt like about five minutes. Whatever the bowling equivalent of an FBT is, it's not something you can accuse Johnson of being.

God help us all if he gets injured, though. Spearmint and Vicious were made to toil a bit, even thought we knocked them over twice for 200.

Will they bounce back? You would expect so. Can we improve? We dont have to, just keep this intensity up and keep taking those cathces. The rabble that was the team touring India vs this team is so far apart that it is sad to have to compare. A Mitch in time, takes 49

We're still pretty flaky with the bat, although somehow our top-order looked much more like a top order in Centurion. It certainly looked a lot better without middle-order bits and pieces places masquerading as specialist batsmen - Watson and Bailey I'm looking your way! Either way, something that we seemed to have missed is that we've been out-batting teams as well as out-bowling them. Scoring centuries isn't necessarily the only indicator of successful batting, but there's got to be something in the fact that we've only conceded one in the last seven Tests - Ben Stokes' 120 at the WACA. In that time we've racked up fifteen though, which is more than two per Test.